Industrialization, urbanization, and cultural pluralism are among twentieth-century America's most salient characteristics. Rhode Island, during the last three decades of the nineteenth century (the so called Gilded Age), came to exhibit these traits more markedly than any other state.
Rhode Island's four big industries continued to boom. Cotton textiles evidenced a trend towards consolidation -- bigger mills, more employees, and more spindles. This enterprise dominated the economy of the Blackstone Valley, and the Providence-based cotton textile empire formed by Benjamin B. and Robert Knight was allegedly the largest in the world. By 1900 this industry had ninety establishments and an average yearly work force of 24,192.
Woolen production experienced a wartime expansion in the 1860s and continued to flourish at century's end. With entrepreneurs like Charles Fletcher leading the way, Providence ranked first among the cities of the nation by 1900 in the production of woolen and worsted goods, and Rhode Island, with fifty-four establishments employing 16,738, ranked third among the states in this area of manufacture.
In the base-metals trade the state was also prominent. Brown and Sharpe (located in Providence until its relocation to North Kingstown in 1964) was the largest producer of machine tools in the nation, and its managers Joseph Brown and Lucien Sharpe became renowned for such inventions as the micrometer and the vernier caliper.
The state also boasted the country's largest steam-engine factory, founded and run by George Corliss of Providence. The crowning achievement of this noted inventor and his firm was the construction of the gigantic steam engine used to power the machinery displayed at the mammoth Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876.
0ther giants of the base-metals industry included the file company of William T. Nicholson, the world's largest producer of metal files and rasps, and William G. Angell's American Screw Company, whose three large Providence plants turned out more wood and machine screws during this era than any other company in the world. By 1900 Rhode Island had 144 machine shops and foundries that employed 8,799 workers.
The precious-metals industry also enjoyed phenomenal growth. The Gorham Manufacturing Company in Providence was the country's largest producer of silverware, and its statues, memorials, and architectural bronze work were famous nationwide. Among the best known of Gorham's creations is its statue of the Independent Man, which has stood atop the State House since 1899. While Gorham was the giant, many smaller jewelry and silverware firms also flourished -- enough of them to make Providence and its environs the world's leading costume jewelry manufacturing center. By 1900 this industry claimed 249 establishments employing 8,767 people throughout the state.
During the Gilded Age these "big four" industries were joined by a fifth major area of manufacturing endeavor -- rubber goods, especially footware. Woonsocket, Providence, Bristol, and Warten contained this industry's principal plants, while entrepreneurs Joseph Banigan, Joseph Davol, Samuel P. Colt, and Governor Augustus O. Bourn provided this fledgling industry with either inventive genius or managerial expertise. Most interesting of these rubber tycoons was Banigan, an Irish Catholic immigrant who became a founder and president of United States Rubber Company. In addition to his diverse business venture’s, Banigan devoted much of his time and fortune to humanitarian causes and became the greatest single benefactor of the social programs of the Diocese of Providence.
Banigan was certainly not the average nineteenth century Rhode Island entrepreneur. Horatio Alger stories like his were far from common. A collective portrait of the state's business elite would look like this: Neither an immigrant nor the son of one, the typical Rhode Island businessman was born in the northeastern United States, usually Rhode Island, and could trace his ancestry back to English forebears who settled there in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He was raised in an urban environment, in a middle-or-upper-class household, completed at least a secondary school education, and sometimes attended college. He was a Protestant, probably Episcopal or Congregational. He did not start to work until he was past nineteen years of age, and then it was usually in a business that was operated by a member of his family. By middle age he had reached a position of prominence within the state. He was usually connected with more than one business; a Republican, he participated in the running of his community through elected and appointed positions; he belonged to several clubs and took an active part in community affairs; he lived in the East Side-College Hill section of Providence and sometimes owned a summer house at the shore.
The industrial venturers of such men accelerated the urbanization of Rhode Island. Providence, which annexed nearly thirteen square miles of territory from adjacent parts of Cranston, Johnston, and North Providence, grew from a population of 54,595 in 1865 to a thriving metropolis of 175,597 in 1900, ranking twentieth in size among the cities of the United States.
During this era the city of Woonsocket was created, first by consolidating the Cumberland mill villages of Woonsocket, Clinton, and Social on the northeast bank of the Blackstone in 1867 and then by adding to them the Smithfield villages of Globe, Bernon, and Hamlet on the southwest bank in 1871. The densely populated mill town became a city in 1888.
Pawtucket also experienced a metamorphosis from a cluster of villages to a city. The Massachusetts Town of Pawtucket was annexed in 1862, and in 1874 it wys joined to the North Providence village of the same name. This 8.68-square-mile municipality became the state's second most populous city in 1885.
Other political cell division took place in the Blackstone Valley when "old" Smithfield was divided in 1871. In addition to the mill villages annexed by Woonsocket, the towns of Lincoln and North Smithfield were also set off. Eventually the densely populated manufacturing area of Central Falls was detached from Lincoln in 1895 and made the state's fifth city, its small size -- an area of 1.32 square miles -- its most unusual feature.
Closely related to industrialization and urbanization was immigration; jobs were the magnet that drew foreigners to Gilded Age Rhode Island. In this period the state began to acquire its remarkable ethnic diversity.
From the 1860s through the 1880s, French-Americans from Quebec migrated in impressive numbers. During the Civil War, textile manufacturers recruited the Quebec habitant to relieve the manpower shortage in Rhode Island's mills. That move opened the floodgates, and by 1890 more French Canadians were migrating to Rhode Island annually than any other ethnic group. Most settled in the Blackstone Valley towns, especially Woonsocket, but large numbers went to the Pawtuxet Valley, especially to the village of Arctic. Providence and Warren also attracted a significant number of France-American residents. By the state census of 1895, there were 40,231 Rhode Islanders who had both parents born in French Canada.
The early Gilded Age also witnessed migrations from Germany and Sweden. In 1865 there were 1,626 Rhode Islanders of German parentage; by 1895 that figure had increased to 7,027. Most of these immigrants were Protestant, especially Lutheran, but one in five professed Roman Catholicism. Germans settled mainly in Pawtucket and Providence, particularly in the capital city's West End -- Olneyville, Manton, Broadway, Elmwood, and West Elmwood. Many were skilled workmen who rained employment in the jewelry industry and such other trades as shoe manufacturing, cabinetmaking, baking, and brewing.
Sweden, which suffered a famine in 1868 and a decline in the agricultural sector of its economy, sent many migrants to the United States in the late nineteenth century. Most went to the Midwest, but some made Rhode Island their New World destination. Those of Swedish parentage went from fewer than 100 in 1865 to 6,915 in 1895. Providence accounted for approximately 40 percent of that total, most of them on the city's South Side. The Auburn, Eden Park, and Pontiac sections of Cranston also attracted large numbers of these migrants from Scandinavia. They sought work in textiles, base metals, and jewelry, but some engaged in gardening and other agricultural pursuits. The Swedes were devout Lutherans and became staunch Republicans.
A much overlooked element in early Gilded Age immigration was the British Americans. As late as 1885, migrants to Rhode Island from England and British Canada ranked third and fourth, respectively, behind Irish and France-Americans, in the annual number of new arrivals. These British immigrants, many of whom brought industrial skills, settled mainly in Pawtucket. North Providence, and Providence. Most were Protestant in religion and Republican in politics, and they readily and rapidly assimilated. By 1895 there were 30,380 Rhode Islanders with both parents born in England, plus another 7,671 with parents born in either Scotland or Wales.
The European arrivals discussed thus far -- Irish, English, Swedes, and Germans -- were from the northern and western sectors of the continent. Towards the end of the Gilded Age, a movement called by historians the "New Immigration" brought a great wave of refugees from southern and eastern Europe. Rhode Island received a generous share of this outpouring. From the south and the Mediterranean came significant numbers of Portuguese, Greeks, Armenians, Syrian-Lebanese, and, especially, Italians. From the east, Poles, Lithuanians, Jews, and Ukrainians began their exodus.
At century's end the streets of Rhode Island's major cities sounded with the babel of new tongues; inner-city neighborhoods and blocks took on old-world characteristics; parishes, ethnic congregations, and synagogues sprang up; and factories flourished with the cheap and abundant labor which these newcomers provided.
Worlds apart from industrial, urban, and ethnic Rhode Island were the life-styles of South County and Newport. The former area was still basically rural and agrarian, but farming was in a steady state of decline. Most South County towns continued to lose population as their inhabitants were lured by the city or the new, cheap lands in the West. Two bright spots in an otherwise bleak economy were the nationally renowned granite industry of Westerly, which supplied more than one third of the memorials on the Gettysburg battlefield, and the equally famous and flourishing coastal resort of Narragansett Pier, whose oceanfront hotels and fabulous Casino attracted wealthy summer residents from throughout the country.
Even more posh and prestigious as a summer resort was Newport, and the late nineteenth century was Newport's Golden Age. "The City by the Sea" had been a mecca for well-to-do vacationers since colonial times, and from the 1840s its popularity as a rich man's resort steadily grew. Several large hotels had been built in the three decades before the Civil War, but by the 1870s more and more summer colonists were choosing to build cottages with ocean vistas closer to the beaches. Favored sites for the very wealthy -- the Astors, Vanderbilts, Wetmores -- were along Cliff Walk and the newly extended Bellevue Avenue. From their exclusive haunts at the Casino (1880), the Newport Country Club (1894), and Bailey's Beach Club (1897), the magnates of late nineteenth-century America engaged in such leisure activities as yachting, fox hunting, polo, golf, and tennis. With such an auspicious debut, Newport later became the site of the America's Cup races and the International Tennis Hall of Fame.
During this splendid and extravagant era, the city of Newport (incorporated 1853) also strengthened its ties with the United States Navy. In 1884 the prestigious U.S. Naval War College opened its doors. Alfred Thayer Mahan arrived soon thereafter to begin his distinguished career as a professor and the nation's foremost exponent and historian of seapower.
While the Newport "Four Hundred" engaged in luxurious leisure, other Rhode Islanders took their recreation in more popular and common ways. For the participant, cycling was the current rage, while rowing or canoeing on the Seekonk, the Pawtuxet, or the artificial lakes of the newly created Roger Williams Park was also a relaxing exercise. The more sedate could attend a concert by David Wallis Reeve's American Band, have a traditional clambake along the shore, or take a steamboat excursion on the bay to such popular amusement centers as Rocky Point and Crescent Park.
A new form of entertainment was baseball, and Providence boasted its own major league team, the Grays. In 1879 and again in 1884 this talented squad won the National League title, equivalent to the championship of professional baseball.
In higher education Rhode Island made notable advances. In addition to the establishment of the Naval War College, this period witnessed the founding of the Rhode Island School of Design (1877), a nationally renowned industrial design institute. RISD was the centennial project of a group of Rhode Island women. Two decades later many of these same feminists broke the sex barrier at Brown and established Pembroke College (1897) as a department of that prestigious university.
In the area of public education, the defunct state normal school -- the forerunner of Rhode Island College -- was reopened in Providence (1871) and furnished with an impressive modern building in 1898. Also, a land-grant state college for instruction in agriculture and the mechanic arts -- the forerunner of the University of Rhode Island -- was opened at Kingston in 1892.
Other important public service institutions had their origins during the Gilded Age, most notably Rhode Island Hospital (1868); Providence Public Library (1878); Roger Williams General Hospital (1878); Lying-In Hospital, now Women and Infants (1884); and St. Joseph's Hospital (1892).
In politics the last four decades of the century marked an era of Republican dominance. On national issues the GOP championed a high tariff and sound money. When native-born Irish grew numerous enough to challenge Republican ascendancy, the majority party (led after the death of U.S. Senator Henry Anthony in 1884 by U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich and Charles R. "Boss" Brayton) removed the real estate requirement for voting in order to recruit and enfranchise certain sociocultural foes of the Irish -- of immigrants from French Canada, England, British Canada, and Sweden. By the end of the century the political battle lines between WASP Republican and Irish Catholic Democrat were sharply drawn, with the newer immigrants holding the balance of power. This balance temporarily rested with the Republican party.
In one aspect the era closed as it began -- with Rhode Islanders returning home from war. In April 1898 the Spanish-American War began. The state raised several military units for this bout with Spain, but only the crewmen of the U.S.S. Vulcnn, a repair ship, saw combat in this brief conflict. All of the state's 1,780 volunteers were mustered out of service by April 1899 as Rhode Island prepared to greet the new century.